magnificent obsession

A conspicuous number of my favourite movies are about men driven, usually over the brink, by obsession: James Stewart in Vertigo, Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris, Lee Marvin in Point Blank, Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Then there's John Wayne in The Searchers, a movie which is kind of the Moby Dick of movies about obsession. (And what's Moby Dick about? Yup, you go it: a guy completely crazed by that white whale.) With Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese made what is perhaps the ultimate movie trilogy about obsession: Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The King of Comedy.

Going back much further, you can trace the damp footprints of movie obsession at least as far as Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel, Dana Andrews in Laura, Glenn Ford in The Big Heat. Nabokov's Lolita. Just about every western than James Stewart made with Anthony Mann -- The Man From Laramie, Winchester '73, The Far Country, The Naked Spur, Bend of the River -- is about a man driven to the frontiers of sanity by the need to get even. But those are westerns, and since westerns are largely about rationalizing violence, there's no motivator like revenge, and nothing primes the fuel pump of obsession quite like the desire to see your enemies -- who have shot you, beaten you, stolen your horse and left you for dead -- choking on the dirt they're about to be buried in.

But revenge is obsession boiled to its essence, and there have been some terrific movies -- not all of them westerns -- about men who unhinge themselves to get what they think is justified. This is Lee Marvin in Point Blank. Sprung from prison and hellbent on getting those who double-crossed and set him up, he'll stop at nothing, including the gradually dawning realization that he's never going to get the satisfaction of fulfillment. But here's the thing, by which I mean the thing that makes obsession so compelling in the first place: he keeps going anyway. He's got no choice.

That's what I find so deeply, irresistibly, seductively compelling about these movies. They're ultimately about passion pushed to the point of insanity. Think of John Wayne's thunderous racist anger in The Searchers, Dreyfuss's lunatic, family-shattering pursuit of an extraterrestrial vision in Close Encounters, Brando's seething pain in Last Tango, or the gradual psychotic storm brewing inside Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. Aptly then, it was Martin Scorsese who once said something about moviemaking as the art of making your audience every bit as obsessed with a story as you are. Once you've done that, you can take them anywhere.

The best movies about obsession take us way out of our comfort zone. They do this by permitting us to experience the protagonist's drive from both the outside and the inside. So while we grow quite naturally nervous as De Niro's Travis Bickle begins to take on more and more indications of imminent internal apocalypse in Taxi Driver, you're still more than a little sympathetic toward this sadsack, maladroit loser -- and Vietnam vet -- who's really just trying to find a way to fit in. Same thing with Stewart -- whose consistent brilliance in borderline nutjob roles is way too under-appreciated -- as Scotty in Vertigo. At first you feel for the guy -- I mean, he's Jimmy Stewart for chrissakes -- but then a crack starts to open between us and him, and it only widens as the movie goes on. His pursuit of a dead woman, and his re-making of a living one in her image (both played by Kim Novak), is hardly the stuff of conventional romantic love. It's delusional, cruel and flat-out, full-on crazy.

By necessity if not by nature, these movies are all about loners, or at least men who become so as their particular pathology entrenches itself more deeply in their being. Although he's managed to bring the girl, kidnapped by Comanche warriors he despises so intensely, home without killing her -- which remains a highly likely possibility right up until the last moment -- Wayne's character in The Searchers turns back toward the frontier before the door closes on him. You can't let him and he knows it. This guy is fundamentally dangerous and beyond domestication, and must be sent back into the wilderness from whence he came. That smile on Brando's face at the end of Last Tango gives away the relief he probably feels at being gutshot. After all, we've already seen the depths of his rage, resentment, misathropy and self-loathing, and it's been a whole lot more riveting than pretty. When Maria Schneider's gun discharges into Brando's stomach, he's saved the bother of killing himself.

So it should come as not surprise that I loved David Fincher's Zodiac a couple of years ago. Not only was it about the pursuit of a real-life serial killer -- in itself a rather obsessive sort of hobby -- but it focused on the ultimately bottomless vortex of clues, rumours, riddles, tips and dead end alleys the killers' pursuers are ultimately, irreversibly and fruitlessly pulled into. The further they go with their investigation the more obsessed they become, despite the fact, and very likely even because of it, they're never going to catch their killer. Zodiac is about professional dedication as a kind of pathology, the endless pursuit of the un-capturable prey. They're chasing a ghost.

Bleak? Well, I guess so, but bleak is as bleak does. I happen to love these movies, and what I love about them is the way they follow the dead-end logic of their characters as far as they do. Because that's what separates real obsession from just a passing spasm of intemperate fascination or fleeting infatuation: it takes you beyond reason and it cannot be fulfilled. It ultimately becomes the thing itself, far greater and more powerful than its object. It takes over, adjusts the rearview, and begins to drive.

It helps, of course, that I'm an obsessive type myself. Always have been, probably always will be. For better or worse, my relationship to most things has tended to fall in one of two categories: they're either entirely transfixing or of no interest whatsoever. There is no in between. Well, there is -- and that's what keeps me just this side of crazy -- but you get the point. Because when I do get fixated on something, it simply will not let go. It's all I think about, all I want to read about, all I want to write about. Indeed, it's why I do what I do, and what has given a weird kind of direction and momentum to my life. So when I watch these movies they have a built in, doubly irresistible allure: by identifying with the obsession of these characters, I immerse myself in the films' depths like someone sinking into a warm pool. Glub, glub, glub...

Here's just a random list of some of things I've gone overboard for -- and by that, I mean totally preoccupied with -- over the years: The Monkees, Batman comics, Peanuts, Pogo, Planet of the Apes, the Rolling Stones, W.C. Fields, Mad, Planet of the Apes, David Bowie, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Frank Frazetta paperback covers, The Godfather I & II, records, cd, videocassette and DVD collecting, Hank Williams, Converse high-tops, Muhammad Ali, motorcycle jackets, Miles Davis, Richard Nixon, the JFK assassination, the Black Donnellys, Alvin Karpis, Ted Bundy (and other much written about serial killers, who are the creepiest obsessives of them all), Norman Mailer, Frank Sinatra, punk, soul, funk, country and western,  '60s garage/psychedelic comps, Warner Brothers cartoons, power pop, film noir, Twin Peaks, The Sopranos, The Wire...


So I get these guys, and god knows they get to me. Obsession movies are a magnificent obsession, but only if they follow the logic all the way to the only possible revelation: you never really get what you want, and it doesn't really matter. The desire, the hunger, the appetite, the drive, the need itself. That's the thing.